Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by t43562 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

t43562

Qualcomm is slightly bigger than ARM so it seems like a fair fight to me. Does Qualcomm police it's IP at all?

View on HN

According to Wikipedia,

Qualcomm has 50,000 employees, $51 billion assets and $35 billion revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm

ARM Holdings has 7000 employees, $8 billion assets and $3 billion revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings

I think "slightly bigger" is an understatement.

That's roughly the same size -- like swamp thing vs namor -- both are name brand, almost blue chip heros.

Or put another way -- as they said in gawker[1] -- if you're in a lawsuit with a billionaire you better have a billionaire on your side or you're losing.

In this case -- it's unlikely that qualcomm will have quite enough juice to just smoosh Arm, in the same way that they would be able to just smoosh a company that's 100th the size of arm (not just 1/10th), regardless of the merits of the case.

[1]https://gawker.com/how-things-work-1785604699

> Qualcomm is slightly bigger than ARM so it seems like a fair fight to me.

I'm not really sure what you're responding to. It's got nothing to do with size whether or not something is fair, it's what is in the contract. None of us know exactly what's there so if it becomes disputed then a court is going to have to decide what is fair.

But that was entirely not the point of my comment though. I'm talking about how corporations looking to make chips or get into the ecosystem view ARM and its behavior with its architecture and licensing. ARM Ltd might well be in the right here by the letter of their contracts, but that canceling their customer's license (ostensibly if not actually siding with another customer who is in competition with the first) is just not a good look for positioning they are going for.

You might be right, but they do perhaps also have to establish that their contracts are going to be defended/enforced. Otherwise they have nothing.

Big middle ground before nuclear option of canceling license entirely though. It's a bad look too because Nuvia/QC has bad blood with Apple, and Apple is suspected to be a very favored client for ARM, so ARM has this problem of potentially appearing to be taking Apple's side against Qualcomm.

I'm not saying that's what happened or that ARM did not try to negotiate and QC was being unreasonable and the whole thing has nothing at all to do with Apple, or that ARM had any better options available to them. Could be they were backed into a corner and couldn't do anything else. I don't know. That doesn't mean it's not bad optics for them though.

Does Qualcomm police it's IP at all?

Traditionally they've been known as a tech company that employs more lawyers than engineers, if that tells you anything.

I'd probably go up against IBM or Oracle before I tugged on Qualcomm's cape. Good luck to ARM, they'll need it.

Oracle v Qualcomm would be epic.

The public will likely be the loser of such a battle. :-(

Not if they end up cancelling each other's patents. :)

I am an ex Qualcomm employee. We often called ourselves a law firm with a tech problem. QC doesn't actually have more lawyers than engineers, but I'd not be surprised if the legal department got paid more than all the engineers combined.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com